The next industrial revolution could be upon us as machines that create items
in plastic or concrete become ever cheaper, writes Roger Highfield.

Some use it to grow bones. Others to build planes. The American talk show host Jay Leno used it to replace the rusty bits of his 1907 White Steamer automobile, one of his vast collection of old cars. Hardly a week goes by without headlines about 3D printing, a technology that’s going to change the way you live. Welcome to the next industrial revolution.

The first industrial revolution boosted the income of hoi polloi and reshaped society over decades as manual labour was displaced by machine-based manufacturing. Factories produced items in their thousands and tens of thousands to enjoy vast economies of scale. Today, however, bespoke craftsmanship is making a comeback, thanks to 3D printing or “additive manufacturing”, in which a three-dimensional object is built layer by layer.

As a manufacturing process, 3D printing contrasts with the traditional “subtractive” approach, which relies on milling, grinding and cutting to remove material, wasting much of it in the process. This creative development offers all kinds of advantages and innovations.

The company 3T RPD, of Greenham Common, Berkshire, working in partnership with the University of Southampton, has created an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle; the world’s first 3D-printed aircraft. At Loughborough University, Richard Buswell is developing a vast, three-storey rig to create buildings by ''concrete printing’’.

Susmita Bose and colleagues at Washington State University recently described in the journal Dental Materials how they used a customised printer to create a bone-like material that can be used in orthopaedic operations and dental work. Other researchers are laying down layers of living cells. And a new generation of edible objects is being printed by Peter Walters at the University of the West of England. Scientists can reconstruct fossil bones, clone priceless artefacts and forge body parts.

Why stock warehouses with parts from abroad when entire designs can now be stored in virtual computer warehouses, waiting to be printed locally, and on demand? So asks a Science Museum curator, Ben Russell, who has used 3D printing at University College London to recreate the contents of a delicate plaster mould that turned out to be a lost bust of the Scottish engineer James Watt. He says 3D printing is an organic blend of craft and hi-tech that is a million miles from the production line assembly methods pioneered by Henry Ford.

The idea is not new: 3D printers have been available commercially for three decades, and are routinely used to make prototypes by car manufacturers. I first become aware of the potential of what was then called “rapid prototyping” in 2004, when I visited the Renault F1 team works in Oxfordshire, where titanium and plastic components were solidified from a soup of ingredients scanned by a beam of blue laser light.

But what has changed is that 3D printers are becoming cheaper, smarter, better and more ubiquitous. One of the more remarkable developments came from Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath, with RepRap, which stands for ''replicating rapid-prototyper”, on which I reported for this paper. RepRap had first been honed to print out everyday plastic goods such as door handles, sandals and coat hooks. The machine works like a printer but, rather than squirting ink on to paper, it puts down thin layers of molten biodegradable plastic which solidify to make objects.

Three years ago, however, the machine had succeeded in copying all of its own 3D-printed parts, which could be assembled into a new RepRap machine.

RepRap marked the birth of a domestic machine, a revolution analogous to that which saw the mainframe computer give way to the desktop PC. Recently it became available in kit form and Bowyer has already sold 100. All the while, the software and other ingredients are getting cheaper. There are rival kits, from Bits from Bytes to MakerBot. There are hackers adapting and improving them. As the technology mutates and evolves, the quality of the objects they can make gets better.

“Just about everyone in developed countries runs their own CD-pressing plant, their own photographic laboratory, and their own printing press. So why shouldn’t they run their own factory, too?’ asks Bowyer. “And – while we’re at it – let’s make it a RepRap factory that manufactures more factories. We might get to a point where individuals can make all the things they want (including, of course, the RepRap machine that does the making).”

He likes to think of it as a new kind of home-grown movement, but for goods rather than food. “Your attic room will be your machine kitchen-garden, making everything from door handles to mobile phones. And if you have an actual kitchen garden as well, you can grow the plastic for RepRap - that’s polylactic acid, which is made from starch. You’ll have a self-replicating machine making useful goods from a self-replicating material supply.”

And here’s his revolutionary parting shot: when the day comes when we can all use 3D printing to make our own, we will have less need for money. “Where money doesn’t flow, it’s very hard to levy taxes.” Vive la revolution!

• Roger Highfield is the director of external affairs, National Museum of Science and Industry